Ah, New England!

Returned one week ago tonight from my second trip to New England in recent years.

A few years back, Larry and I had explored Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire; after he and I split up I chose Maine as the destination for my first post-Larry solo trip, in 2008.

This time, I traveled with my sister Gayle – our first long trip together as adults (an entire week), and Gayle’s first to that part of the world.

We were lucky with everything about this trip: the weather was ideal (it wasn’t cold, like we feared it would be the final week of October); the scenery was glorious (plenty of trees like the one above to gape at); we stayed in interesting, comfortable places; and the restaurant food we chose was excellent to memorable for every meal we ate!

We spent the first half of our week-long trip in coastal Maine, travelling far enough north to drive around Acadia National Park, which certainly lived up to its reputation as a primo beauty spot.

Then we zoomed over into New Hampshire and thence to Vermont, where we woke up one morning to the state’s first snowfall of the year, which of course was thoroughly enchanting for us “southren” tourists!

Each time I’ve ventured into this part of the world, I’ve come away loving it more and more. The fabulosity and sheer numbers of independent bookstores alone would be plenty to recommend it, but of course there’s everything else the region offers as well.

No art museums this trip (except for a quick romp around the seaside gardens of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art), but there were plenty of protracted shopping sprees in various country stores! Among other things we UPS-ed home is a set of windchimes found in Wiscasset, Maine.

I certainly hope to make further forays into this charming, historic part of the country. Next time, though, I hope to plant myself in one spot and limit the amount of driving. It was fun to see so many interesting and picturesque places in four different states, but lolling around in any one of them would be a lot more restful. The problem will be deciding which Glorious Spot to spend that time in!

2 thoughts on “Ah, New England!”

The tree in the photo, by the way, is behind the Sarah Orne Jewett homestead in Berwick, Maine, which a friend of a friend who lives there took us to see (the homestead, not the tree). And I’m reading Cioran because I found his book in one of those wonderful bookstores up there! I’ve never read him before (although I’d seen references to his works over the years), but was intrigued with the title when I espied it in a bookstore in Manchester, VT; and got even more intrigued when scanning a few randomly-chosen paragraphs. The price was amazingly cheep ($4?), so home it came with me – and tonight, in fact, I picked it up to see what I could see. Finished Susan Sontag’s amazing intro, and got partly into the first essay. I like his aphoristic style (translation is by Richard Howard), but, apart from what Sontag describes about him, don’t know anything about the guy. I saw the Derek Jarman film WITTGENSTEIN the other night, and must be in some sort of philosophical mood this week…Let me know if you have any experience with Mr. Cioran yourself – inquiring minds would love to know. (My formal philosophical training at Mercer pretty much stopped at Kierkegaard – we never got to Wittgenstein or even Nietzche, much less any of the other 20th century fellows, so I regard the Cioran-reading as part of my unfinished education.)

From Cal’s Commonplace Book

The Constant Reader

Books Read This Year

Updated February 20, 2019

“I continue to think of myself as someone who is essentially a reader—a man who takes a deep pleasure in good books, who views reading as a fine mode of acquiring experience, and who still brings the highest expectations to what he reads. By the highest expectations I mean that I am perhaps a naïve person who has never ceased to believe that books can change his life, and decisively so.” – Joseph Epstein (from Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives [1989], quoted by Patrick Kurp at his blog Anecdotal Evidence)

JUST FINISHED:

Asymmetry (2018) by Lisa Halliday

I read this award-winning debut novel for my book club. The book is devoted to two different sets of characters (and two different settings). Halliday is an excellent writer, but I couldn’t find myself caring too much about the fate of the main characters in the first story (involving a Manhattan-based novelist and his much younger mistress). The second set of characters (an Iraqi-American and his family and acquaintances) were also drawn very vividly, but what I appreciated the most about this part of the book was Halliday’s skillful insertion of the horrific damage caused to civilians by the U.S. government’s imperialistic venture in Iraq. The third part of the novel (an interview with the novelist featured in the first part of Asymmetry) seemed tacked on and unnecessary. I’d recommend this author, but not this book.

CURRENTLY READING (in addition to trying to keep up with the most recent issues of the planet’s two best magazines, The Sun and the New Yorker):

A Southern Garden (1942) by Elizabeth Lawrence

As William James Said: Extracts from the Published Writings of William James (1942) edited by Elizabeth Perkins Aldrich

BOOKS FINISHED EARLIER THIS YEAR:

An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town(2009) by David Farley

I ran across this book at a recent library book sale, and am so glad I did. Part travel diary, part detective story, part history, it has two things bound to capture my interest: it’s a chronicle of an American living for a year in a tiny Italian hilltop town for a year, intermingled with a dogged quest for understanding (and locating) a notorious holy relic. Who knew that the fervent veneration of Jesus’s circumcised foreskin (yes, you read that correctly!) had such a long and interesting career? Farley’s sense of humor and his scrupulous scholarship, together make this a delightful romp of a book – and a thoroughly entertaining case study of the absurdity (and lucrativeness) of religious cults. And I was happy to see, in Farley’s notes, his reference to another Italy-themed travelog I enjoyed reading years ago, Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the history of the World (2007).

In the Morning: Reflections from First Light (2006) by Philip Lee Williams

Like me, this book’s author is a “morning person.” Unlike me, he writes about his early morning walks, and this book is a sampling of the thoughts that those pre-dawn walks have provoked over the years. Williams is both a poet and a science writer, and his ruminations show that fact. Williams lives about 90 miles from where I do, so that was an added plus in my enjoyment of these essays.

Somewhere Near the End: A Memoir (2009) by Diana Athill

By happy coincidence, the same week that one of my author heroines, Diana Athill, died (at age 101), I discovered that I’d at some point purchased – but never got around to starting – a copy of Somewhere Near the End, now over eight years old. I eagerly plucked it from my bookshelf and spent most of the next three days devouring it. The adjectives in the blurbs excerpted from the book’s reviews are, for once, are spot-on: “remorseless and tender,” “a wisdom more ambient than aphoristic,” “refreshingly candid,” “fiercely intelligent…and never dull,” “unflinching,” “deals with growing old with bravery, humor and honesty,” “prose as clear and graceful as ever,” “brilliant; entirely lacking in the usual regrets [and] nostalgia.” “as unalarmed by the prospect of death as by the seeming meaninglessness of the universe,” “her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting”, “bracingly frank…joyful rather than grim.’ Or, to use the description supplied by the organization that gave this book its annual award for biography: “candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and, above all, beautifully, beautifully written.” If I were ever to embark on any writing project myself, I would aim to write with the precision, the honesty, and the humility of Diana Athill.

Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World(1988; updated 1997) by Tom Cowan

Brief and straightforward biographical sketches of over 40 lesbians and gay men who enriched the fields of art, literature, theater, music, science, social science, or philosophy. A bit like spending time reading a series of Wikipedia entries, I was often surprised at the author’s ability to clearly express why he’d chosen these particular worthies over the ones he omitted. In any case, I learned – in almost every bio – something new (to me) and important about celebrities I (mistakenly) thought I already knew a fair amount about.

Ultimate Questions (2016) by Brian Magee

I am not familiar with the Britain-based Magee’s earlier works, but am so glad he wrote this one and so glad I found it. (His earlier book, ThePhilosophy of Schopenhauer will be the next book by Magee that I will track down). One reviewer wrote about this book: “Magee writes clearly, without jargon, and he makes his case for profound agnosticism with considerable force.” Exactly so; in fact, this is probably the single most compelling book of modern philosophy I have ever read. It’s also one of the most eloquent and least pompous books of philosophy I have ever read. This is a book I will buy a copy of for the sheer pleasure of re-reading its arrestingly clear (and mostly irrefutable) sentences.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018) by James Clear

This book’s bringing together of what scientists and psychologists know about habit formation (the making of new ones, the breaking of old ones) is not only useful, but entertainingly presented. Because of the author’s engaging style and his incorporation of findings from multiple post-behaviorism fields (like neurolinguistic programming), it took a while for me to realize that the book is largely a recapitulation of what I’d learned in college (50 years ago!) about operant conditioning. Still, there were things about how habits are formed and how they persist that I needed to be reminded of, especially some of the counter-intuitive features of habit formation, and I am using some of the author’s tips to create some better habits in 2019 – and to get rid of a few undesirable ones.